Can cows shrink deserts?
Allan Savoury is a farmer from Zimbabwe who used to believe that livestock were destroying the land. He still believes the CO2 scary narrative, but even despite all that, he’s an ecologist who now argues we need large herds moving nomadically to stop desertification.
Years ago he was one of the scientists advising the Zimbabwe government to get rid of lifestock to save the land. In a great moment of ecology they even shot 14,000 elephants for land restoration which didn’t work. That was the saddest blunder of my life, he says. And when he went to the US he found national parks were desertifying too even though they had not had livestock on them. “Clearly we didn’t understand what was driving desertification”. He now claims that the soil of grasslands ends up encrusted with algae, which leads to water runoff and evaporation “and that is the cancer that leads to desertification”.
I’m sure cows don’t change the climate either way, but this sure flies in the face of the idea that livestock create deserts and eating meat destroys the land.
h/t to Notalotofpeopleknowthat
Cows are the missing link?
He points out that the soil and vegetation in Africa evolved with massive groups of herding animals being chased by lions and what not. The large masses of herbivores play a vital role in ecology — they return the grass to the land as fertilizer. In turn the booming plant-life boosts carbon and microbes in the soil, and changes the microclimate, keeping temperatures and humidity more constant than bare sand does. Without plants, the rain that falls on the sand evaporates and blows away instead. Grass alone is all very well, except that each year the remnant dry grass needs to decay. If it doesn’t, it smothers the soils and there’s a shift to woody scrubland with bare earth instead. Mere oxidation of grasses is too slow to keep up. The other alternative is fire, but it doesn’t fertilize crops and soil the way cows do, and may not be the best for the microflora either. Savory calls his technique Holistic Management, though there are obviously many details he doesn’t describe.
It turns out this TED Talk was from 2013. Apparently it has attracted millions of views. It has mostly disappeared like a stone. In farming circles there are ardent fans and critics, but possibly very few detailed scientific reviews. George Monbiot dismissed it in 2014, but The Guardian also published a reply from fans. Probably the truth is that it works in some environments and not in others, and because it has no billionaire friends, it hasn’t had the investigation it really needs. I post it here for discussion because it pokes the sacred cow that all livestock “are bad”. Readers may know more…
By Hunter Lovins: Why George Monbiot is wrong: grazing livestock can save the world
Soil scientist, Dr Elaine Ingham, a microbiologist and until recently chief scientist at Rodale Institute, described how healthy soil, the underpinning of civilization throughout history, is created in interaction between grazing animals and soil microbiology. Peer-reviewed research from Rodale has shown how regenerative agriculture can sequester more carbon than humans are now emitting.
…Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms… was made famous in UC Berkeley journalism professor Michael Pollan’s book Omnivore’s Dilemma, which explores his success using Savory’s approach. Salatin explains how Savory’s approach enabled him to turn an uneconomic farm into an operation that now supports 35 prosperous agricultural ventures. From selling grass-fed beef and pasture-raised eggs to health-conscious connoisseurs and teaching interns how to replicate its successes, Polyface Farms is leading an agricultural revival.
I can attest from personal experience that Savory’s approach works. …. In our case, we restored cattle to the ground, managed as Savory advised, and within two years watched the water table rise, wetland plants returned and the economic value of the property increase.
In Australia, for profit company Sustainable Land Management says it has more than doubled stocking rates of cattle over historic rates on seriously desertified Australian range, achieved superior weight gain, doubled plant diversity, restored the grasslands, while buying no feed, even despite severely deficient rain.
Six years later John Cook’s website attempted to rebut the idea. The author Seb V doesn’t discuss desertification much, except to say the obvious that we can’t just put cows in the Sahara and fix it in 40 years. He mostly talks about uncertainties in carbon accounting instead. Seb V claims a couple of studies on “grazing” show no result. But Bellamy 2005 studied English soils where I suspect no one tried to gather livestock into massive wandering holistic herds. And the other study by Schrumpf et al was titled “How accurately can soil organic carbon stocks and stock changes be quantified by soil inventories?”. In other words, it was mostly about carbon accounting, not about restoring deserts. Commenters there were mostly unimpressed. Post Vegan points out that “grazing” is not the same as Holistic Management, Short Duration Grazing or Rotational Grazing either.
From the rebuttal it appears that there have not been any serious scientific studies specifically reviewing the Savoury techniques.
From Wikipedia, a long while ago, Savory’s idea were even fashionable in environmental circles:
In 2003 Australia honored Savory with the Banksia International Award “for the person doing the most for the environment on a global scale”[9] and in 2010, Savory and the Africa Centre for Holistic Management won The Buckminster Fuller Challenge,[10] an annual international design competition awarding $100,000 “to support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems”.[40]
I have read a lot of for and against commentary about Savory’s views. I don’t think it is really some miracle for reversing desertification, but it does seem to have plenty of support among farmers in the form of “regenerative farming” or holistic management. An Australian Charles Massey wrote an excellent book a few years ago about using this technique in Australia to reinvigorate many degraded Australian pastures and soils, “Call of the Reed Warbler”. As far as I know though, cattle farming has been a big problem in many places, for example South America where forests have been cleared to make room for grazing and in the US where so many cattle end up in feedlots necessitating the growing of huge amounts of feed for them (and all the other animals they have inside CAFO systems). Then there is the problem of methane and CO2 emissions, which of course is regarded as a big concern (in Australia, most of our agricultural emissions are methane from livestock). As someone who doesn’t know much about farming, I think regen ag has a lot going for it, especially after reading Massey’s book. From the vegan point of view I am a bit less enthusiastic about farming more animals, but using grazed ruminants in this way in high welfare conditions certainly is way better than how we farm about 95% of the farmed animals, so there’s that.
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You opine on the methane and co2 emissions from ruminant cows.
What would happen if that grass was not eaten , and no fire swept the area? The grass would break down naturally, giving off the same gasses. So lets not ban Cows but ban grass.
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Exactly. As an ex agricultural scientist i am constantly amazed and disappointed by the continual claim that farm animals, particularly ruminants, “produce” CO2 and CH4, as if the carbon in those two compounds had been developed by these animals from “thin air”. Well, actually in a way it has, because all the carbon came from CO2 in the air, fixed by photosynthesis in the forage that the animals eat and eventually returned to the air through a multitude of biological routes. Farm animals do NOT add to the carbon compounds in the atmosphere.
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“Then there is the problem of methane and CO2 emissions,”
There is ABSOLUTELY NO PROBLEM with methane and CO2 emissions from cows or other livestock (or anything else, for that matter) !.
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1 Ha burnt is worse than 6000 cars.
(Area of Africa is 3 Billion Ha.)
1 billion Ha worse than 6 trillion cars.
If we stop the burning can we keep the cars.?
Even the famous guys with a large following have no feel for numbers.
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There is a lot of miss use of language here. (isn’t there always with ‘marketing’)
Degraded grass lands are NOT deserts, even if they sometimes have a desert like appearence.
In extreme cases the amount of rain falling in degraded area is reduced.
Restoreing these grass lands can restore the rainfall.
You cannot INCREASE the rainfall in deserts.
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Mr. Pegler: I disagree, in fact, AGW predicted increased rain in the deserts (right after it happens).
/s/, I promise.
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Except where forests have been cleared for grazing, a lot of cattle and sheep farming has just replaced one type of wild herbivore with a domesticated herbivore.
Also, in Africa, a lot of expanding desertification is due to people cutting down trees for firewood ay desert margins because they don’t have access to proper sources of energy (e.g. coal, gas, liquid fuels).
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At least in Africa, things are getting better due to CO2 fertilization
https://www.climatedepot.com/2019/01/17/global-greening-study-climate-change-shrinks-sahara-desert-by-whopping-8-700000-square-kilometers-of-added-green-vegetation/
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If this were true FNP’s would have been pastoralists instead of nomadic wanderers living off grubs and lizards.
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According to Jared Diamond, they would have been nomadic pastoralists, if they had suitable animals (ie sheep and goats). In many areas of the world there were no suitable animals so people remained as hunter gathers.
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They did not have suitable animals to herd. There is also a good chance they killed off some of the best candidates for easy food according to Tim Flannery in his book “Future Eaters”.
Observe the explosion in the size of camel herds in the deserts of Central Australia. They are not making it worse.
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I am surprised that in the millenia of Aboriginal settlement in Australia, a domesticable herd animal such as a pig from PNG or Indonesia never made it to Australia, such as might have been brought by Indonesian fishermen who were known to be regular visitors.
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They came only for the trepang (sea cucumbers) and didn’t bring any pigs.
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I understand that but they traded with Aboriginals. A pig (or breeding pair) would have made a good trade. Plus, before the 13th century when Mohammedism came to Indonesia, you’d think they might have populated some islands and areas with pigs for food, as was common practice with European sailors.
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2 pigs a plague makes. You are correct that a few pigs would have made a difference. Just observe the thousands or is it millions of porkers running wild in the North of Australia and spreading South. 40 years ago I was running into wild pigs in Muswellbrook while harvesting wheat. I say in Muswellbrook because that paddock is now a housing estate. Consider though that the Indonesians and New Guineans were raising pigs for hundreds or thousands of years. The Aborigines were not equipped to raise pigs and obviously not inclined to want to. Based on the pig, Aborigines could have developed fixed developments in the North. They didn’t.
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I thought that pigs were classed as unclean animals by Muslims, and therefore haram (forbidden).
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This might have influenced the chances of pig importing –
“Islamic influence in Indonesia
Muslim kingdoms of northern Sumatra”
https://www.britannica.com/place/Indonesia/Islamic-influence-in-Indonesia
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FNP? Former Native People?
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I watched Alan Savory give a TED talk back in 2013 and I was most impressed.
He advocated rotational farming but packing the animals in fairly intensively. They eat the grass right down and spread dung and urine. Then move them to a fresh pasture and the previous area regenerates.
On my Dad’s property the internal fences are mostly down, through neglect. A share farmer has sheep which can roam around over a fairly large area, I have noticed that they are doing that by themselves, eating the grass in an area right down, then moving on. It will be interesting to see how it all looks if we get autumn rain. Otherwise wait for spring.
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Yup, sheep are especially good for this. Their feet push in seeds just the right amount, and their dung is real high in nitrogen. The next year the crops are more abundant.
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I always wondered why domesticated (farmed) sheep are not very common in the US.
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Maybe it’s that they had bad PR. IIRC, keepers of sheep were vilified by keepers of cattle because the sheep were prone to eat all the grass, down to the ground. Word was, the cattle weren’t as likely to do that.
Or maybe the cattle were preferred over sheep because fewer big animals were less trouble to keep up with than lots of smaller animals? The US is a BIG country, with lots of space to settle.
I knew a farmer/rancher who liked Savory’s approach. He was practically giddy when a few cows were able to keep the lawn on the home place under control, and even led to the return of dung beetles.
Some parts of my state are even known to hold regular dung-throwing contests. But if you have dung beetles doing their job, you don’t have “cow patties” to use for such contests.
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They actually are, cattle just have better PR.
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I bought a previously share farmed turf farm. There was so little grass it looked like a billiard table. It was so degraded that a couple of acres of oats I planted only grew to 15cm before going to seed.
I brought in 15 horses & ponies onto 20 acres, way over stocked, & fed them a lot of imported food through 2 years of severe drought.
30 years later with just a couple of retired horses wandering about the grass is now 60Cm high & very thick. All that horse poo certainly rejuvenated the place.
I planted a lot of trees, but even with a lot of help most died. A couple of silky oaks did survive,& the birds have planted their seeds. The birds are better than me or the place is now more productive as there are now about 70 silky oaks, & dozens of various gums.
Silky oaks are good timber & good trees for grazing properties, their roots go deep, & the grass grows right up to them.
I’m sure my horses did as much as I did in reclaiming an abused bit of country.
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True, horses are well known improvers of conditions, some European countries have been reintroducing horses to revive environments.
Top mammal ecologist Dr Craig Downer from Nevada has been stressing the same position with wild horses and burros, even touring Australia’s wild horse herds to confirm his point a few years ago.
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If you want truely sustainable farming, 40,000+ years or more, then read this
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It’s mostly made up so which part should I believe ?
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Yes RR, mainly fiction.
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The gullible leftist will believe ANY con !
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Peter F:
Don’t be so gullible. There is no evidence that aborigines were here over 80,000 years ago (as per that book), nor evidence of farming nor of permanent settlements – the usual result of agriculture.
Intensive agriculture started about 10-12, 000 years ago in The Levant (mostly where it is now too dry for it – possibly due to actual Climate Change?).
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There was some limited agriculture (e.g. fish traps on the Darling and Nardoo on Cooper’s Creek), but the inland climate was too variable for year-round settlement.
There were apparently some rather large gathering places where (probably) annual get-togethers were held (similar to the Henges in the UK?). This is probably the basis for the “permanent settlement” wishful thinking.
Australia doesn’t really have any domesticable animals. The macropods can get out of almost any enclosure which would have been buildable, and suffer capture myopathy in any case. Wombats have a limited geographic range, and can dig out of almost anything. Emus might have been a possibility.
Once you get inland, reliable water is the limiting factor. It was really the artesian bores which allowed grazing in much of Qld and NSW. The second half of the 19th century was also quite wet, which was great for the Bluegrass and Mitchell grass on the plains.
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Sorry, grew out of fairy stories about age seven.
Mind you, I enjoyed reading Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings to my son when he was young.
Compared to Dark Emu, at least they were plausible – if you believe in magic.
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It will be interesting to see what happens on the RM Williams property bought by some eco outfit that destocked it to harvest carbon credits. From experience taking stock out of Crown Land resulted in scrub build making it fire prone. When it burns the minerals either float away or the ash is washed away. Cows crap where they eat and the pat stays put to break down and fertilise the grass. They also crush litter with their hooves making it harder to burn when there is a fire. The best way to keep our national parks fire proof is to allow grazing by cattle augmented by browsers such as camels and goats.
Peter Andrews from Bylong in the Hunter Valley used another system to restore pasture (and grazing) by returning natural water systems to his property and that of Gerry Harvey also. Not the same as Savoury but in a similar vein, observe how nature works and then duplicate it; real science.
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We do know that the planet has been GREENING for about 40 years, see NASA, CSIRO using satellite data etc. And in that time an EXTRA 3 + billion people have suddenly appeared and in 2023 we have a much higher life expectancy and more food etc for everyone.
Perhaps we still have a lot more to learn and happily we don’t shoot thousands of elephants any more at the urging of delusional idiots.
But the data proves that we certainly don’t have an EXISTENTIAL THREAT or crisis or emergency.
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BTW Macrotrends shows that since 1983 another 3.5 billion people have been added to our global population.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/population
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All true Neville, but for the Left, people (non-Elites) are the problem, not a blessing.
Many Leftists actively talk about depopulation (but they use the term “sustainable population”) and this is clearly manifest in their war against inexpensive, reliable energy, their war against agriculture, and their war against human rights, thus facilitating far worse things to come in future.
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David I agree with you and I’m not saying that more people are necessarily a blessing.
But as Ridley pointes out in his linked article, as infant and child morbidity drops in Africa people will have less children.
I’m just linking to the incredible increase in population in Africa and globally to prove that we don’t have an EXISTENTIAL THREAT.
In fact we’re living in the safest, healthiest and wealthiest period in Human history, while the clueless elites tell us we are facing EXTINCTION and boiling oceans or alternatively we could be swamped by their delusional, dangerous SLR or……
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Over 2 hundred years ago the Rev. Malthus drew 2 lines on a graph and predicted over-population REAL SOON. It was promptly disputed.
His idea was accepted by Darwin as a convenient excuse.
Since then it has been regurgitated by Eugenics believers that the world is over populated such as David Attenborough and Paul Ehrlich. I remember the latter saying that “the Earth couldn’t support 3 billion people” but look now, 8 billion and many better off.
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I am surprised the CSIRO reported something positive. Are you sure it was really them? What a shock if the greening was caused by increased CO2. Obviously that particular CO2 must be natural not that terrible stuff produced by humans using fuels. But then they would have to accept that natural CO2 emissions make the bigger contribution to the increasing concentration in our atmosphere. Imagine the consternation around the coffee machine.
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AGAIN here’s Matt Ridley’s report on the changes in Kenya and Tanzania since his first visit as a ten year old in the 1960s.
Amazing change for the wild animals and of course a huge increase in the Human population and improvement over the last 60 + years.
“Plains of plenty” for sure, but when will we think and then wake up to their C C BS and fraud?
https://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/plains-of-plenty/
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Here’s how Matt Ridley finishes his article on Kenya and Tanzania and you’d think they’d need a change of undies with four big male lions passing within 10 feet of their open vehicle.
“A memory I will treasure: one early morning we came upon four young male lions resting by a bush. A herd of nearly 100 elephants with lots of small calves was feeding slowly towards them. Anticipating some kind of clash, Wilson positioned our vehicle so that we could watch what happened. As the two species became aware of each other, the elephants began trumpeting and flapping their ears to scare away the lions. The four brother lions reluctantly decided to slink away.
Our vehicle — with no doors or windows — was in the way and they passed within ten feet of us. Yet to them we were neither prey not predator. They and the elephants never “broke the fourth wall”, as actors say, by looking at us. We were there but we did not affect what happened. After five million years of killing and being killed by lions and elephants, that is a spectacular place for our species to have arrived at”.
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Ecology is so simple, no (natural) fertilizer, no plants.
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I chanced on the Great Green Wall project on wiki a while back.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(Africa)
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https://www.rcsaustralia.com.au/
This organisation in Australia teaches these principles.
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I was part of a farm group who invited Alan to address us in the 90’s, I certainly was able to improve my grass cover and reduce erosion by adapting his techniques.
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Let grass grow in the vineyards: Why? Part 1
New Grass Mixtures for Vineyards
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The extra deployment of cows would also improve the environmental situation by farting and burping CO2 and Methane to improve the functioning of vegetation.
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Oh, dear. Where to start?
Umm, no. If not controlled, the woody weeds get a hold and crowd out the grass. Grazing animals find the young shrubs tasty, and eat the green shoots, so the plants eventually die. Woody plants grow from the leaf tips, but grass grows from the base. That is why perennial grasses can handle moderate grazing pressure.
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Well, one thing we do know. Millions of bison in huge herds DIDN’T wreck the American prairies and in fact may have improved the ecology of that region over many thousands of years.
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Ross – Likewise the absence of huge herds of bison (or their equivalent) did not prevent the development of Australia’s prairie look a like – the extensive Mitchell grasslands (Astrebla spp.) of (mainly) inland Queensland.
To manage grazing lands sustainably the key is to match livestock numbers to the feed available. A major constraint in commercial grazing practice is the necessity to confine livestock with fences. Without fences we can quickly end up with Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” (qv.), but since fences restrict stock movement they can also lead to ‘overgrazing’, in the absence of intense management oversight.
The latter is an essential component of all intensive rotational grazing systems. You need to observe your stock and the land they are grazing with the frequency of managing a dairy herd. Few landholders have that dedication in today’s world.
Soon after Alan Savory took his evangelical insights from southern Africa to the USA in the 1970’s range scientists there designed objective experiments to compare cattle productivity under the Savory system of short duration grazing with traditional ‘set stocking’ systems. However they made one significant change in the latter system by installing additional water points – so that those trial cattle had no further to walk to water than those grazing in the much smaller paddocks, which are a necessity under short duration grazing. The outcome was that the animal productivity from both management systems was essentially the same. But of course the ‘set stocking’ system required much less fencing and far less human management.
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“To manage grazing lands sustainably the key is to match livestock numbers to the feed available”. Preaching to the choir here Bill. Raised on a sheep farm and have been practicing agricultural science for nearly 40 years.
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The additional watering points do make a difference in grazing patterns.
One of the benefits of strip grazing is that the stock don’t get to selectively eat the grasses they prefer and let the rubbish get away on you.
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So Bullsh!t is more valuable than we thought? Man looks at a complex natural system and has the hubris to imagine that he could make it better- only to belatedly realise that nature was superior all along.
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There is a great difference between spoken, written versus natural bullshit, that’s evident 😀
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But methane. Surely, methane, look here, methane I tell you, methane.
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Nature has all the best technology. The best thing humans can do for the environment and climate is to get out of her way.
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Disagree with that entirely Eddie. I have watched as my aging neighbors 2000 acre of mixed improved pasture & open forest grazing paddock turned into a chocked thicket of scrub, with little grass, & not much use to man or native beast.
Even the kangaroos have migrated to my & other places better maintained. I have inherited a mob of about 20. We used to train our eventers in there, galloping hard through the open trees. Today you would be torn apart just riding through there.
He used to put a fire through each paddock once every 3 or 4 years to kill the scrub & young saplings, but gave that up as closer settlement meant many complaints from the Johnny come lately, like us. He lost interest when none of his kids wanted to be farmers. It will probably be a housing estate before I die.
It is estimated that there are 3 times as many trees in Oz today as at first white settlement, with the loss of the aboriginal fire stick. Don’t forget they managed nature for thousands of years before we came.
Captain Cook mentioned in his log that it was rare not to see the smoke of at least 3 fires inland, on his voyage up the coast. If Oz was “natural” in 1770, the natural included a great deal of aboriginal management, not simply nature gone wild.
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I have seen quite a number of curious people recognise that common wisdom in their field is eventually found to be dead wrong.
So here is Allan Savoury recognising that he was directly responsible for the death of thousands of elephants and it was based on dead wrong, incompetent premise but was the common wisdom during his formal education.
Then he blindly accepts the common wisdom that burning fossil fuels is causing the planet to warm up. It beggars belief that people can recognise incompetence in their chosen area of study (even admitting they were poorly educated) but blindly accept the common wisdom in another field of study without question.
On a different aspect of the video – There are a few industrial processes that have scary potential and places I do not like to visit. One of those is the urea reactor plant area of a fertiliser manufacturer. These units look like this for transport:
https://corpwebstorage.blob.core.windows.net/media/28785/urea-reactor.jpg
They are large, high pressure vessels generally mounted vertically and retain highly corrosive fluids under extreme pressure.
The point regarding the reactor is that it is an industrial process created to do what a few thousand cattle can achieve if left to wander the land. But they do not do it alone. Bacteria outweigh ALL the animals, ocean and land, by a factor of 70. These do the bulk of the work. The cattle just improve the conditions for them to work in.
The absolute worst thing that humans can do to impact climate change is sterilise vast areas of land by removing biomass from land to mount solar panels and wind turbines.
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I’ve been chasing cows round and round my farm for over 40 years in NZ and the best way to grow grass is to eat it out over 12 or 24 hours then move the stock off and stand back. Leaving it for 4 weeks will normally be enough time to maximize grass growth for the next grazing. There is a sweet spot of to how hard , or low, to graze it; grass grows grass, and another optimum of how long to let it grow; too long and it loses nutritional value, too short and you miss growth potential, both leaves and roots. Now the roots drive the whole thing, the leaves are the solar panels converting light into carbs.
The absolute worst thing is to set stock, keep animals in the same place long term. It straight off halves potential grass growth. They keep nibbling away any regrowth preventing plants renewing roots and leaves and in time completely killing out areas they like to lie down on or get shade in, so all the poo gets plonked in one area on the zero grass place making it worse for the productive places. A whole snowball scenario ensues where the places left growing keep getting hammered by too many mouths, weeds that cows don’t like become dominant and so less and less food is available to the cows. Throw in a dry spell and thing rapidly tip over, you get more and more dead areas. Conversely throw in a flood and lots of valuable topsoil is washed away, lost for good.
I think the root cause of desertification is set stocking AND goats and camels. These two species hoover up absolutely everything! So when drought or floods hit there is nothing to hold the soil. No weeds, no trees, zipp. It’s complicated, but penning up those damn camels and goats and controlling the grazing would be a huge improvement.
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I understand graziers in central NSW are learning to graze goats successfully with cattle on marginal land. It appears they are improving pastures when grazed with feral goats with an eye to pasture preservation.
https://austrangesoc.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/McMurtrie-et-al-new.pdf
They can recover the cost of controlling the feral goats by selling the meat. I think the goat meat component is becoming profitable as well because some goat herds are being selectively bred now.
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I remember well my time in France, where I worked and lived, there was located an elevation of milk goats.
They really found all green, even climbing as high as possible into trees. Smaller ones of these trees died, the ground was nothing else than a desert, stones, rocks and sand.
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Years ago I watched a documentary about two women who wanted retirement land in Australian countryside but they did not have a lot of money or potential to borrow money. A country friend advised them about a small land parcel on farmland covered with blackberry bushes and obviously considered to be rubbish land of little or no value, so they made an offer and it was accepted.
Their friend also advised them that if they were successful in buying the land they must stock it with Goats and they would clear the weeds, and they did. The women then worked hard and created an income producing local markets based business venture to provide supplementary income to their age pensions.
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To eliminate blackberries you have a hard work, we have a lot in our garden, goats are certainely the best for that work.
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So true Jim. Horses are the worst for that.
I broke my place up into 1.5 acre paddocks with electric fences. The big difference in most of Oz against NZ, you need an inch of irrigation to get the spelled paddock to produce most of the time.
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I forget the details but have you heard about the Australian who developed a land care and improvement system based on ploughing gutters around hills and slopes to slow the flow of rainwater to irrigate the grass? The story I read years ago indicated that the farm became a showcase and the system adopted by many other farmers?
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P Yeomans – The Keyline Plan.
Although written back in the 1950’s Yeoman’s book – “Water For Every Farm- The Keyline Plan” is still available. It has been applied extensively in parts of Australia and overseas. There is quite a lot of keylined farmland north east of Perth and also in Victoria. Mel Gibson keylined his 300 acre property at Tallangata south east of Albury-Wodonga, Victoria.
I have a copy of the original edition buried somewhere. It is a must read for anybody involved in broadacre farming.
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There is a brief description and history of keyline design on Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyline_design
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I disagree Jim. Desertification in many parts of Africa is caused by overgrazing that is true but the real cause is a population of humans explosion. Well meaning outfits and NGOs witnessed people and their animals drinking from wells which were just deep dams with some seepage water in the bottom. They built more wells closer together so the people started living around the wells and denuded the locality of brush wood for their fires and their cattle ate out the grass. Once the vegetation was gone the soil dries out and blows away and thus a desert expands. Before all the wells herd numbers were lower as the cattle had to graze farther afield. It was a case of good people upsetting an old system with the best of intentions and the worst of outcomes.
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“except that each year the remnant dry grass needs to decay”. What is also needed are termites and bugs which convert wood and cellulose to methane. The solution of the modern ecologist, like the solution to shoot 14,000 elephants, is to kill everything to save it. Brilliant. And it didn’t work? That’s embarrassing.
As people talk of blowing up the moon to save the earth from a slight warming. And killing everything. New Ice Age anyone?
We Australians should remember who thought it was a great idea to introduce the prickly pear. And then the Cane Toad. To say nothing much of rabbits and foxes and all the other wonderful ideas from homesick naturalists and hunters. We even have deer and alpaca and 70 million sheep, tens of millions of cattle and we are down to a mere 10 million kangaroos who survived the devastation of the entire continent over 50,000 years by dingoes and fire. Plus then the very handy million feral camels and the goats, all someone’s great idea.
You can add the University of Townsville with their autonomic swimming robots with syringes of cyanide to identify and exterminate the Crown of Thorns starfish, a creature whose arrival is celebrated in legend and song in Tahiti by wiser, less educated people. What could go wrong with a lethal swimming hunting robot on the Great Barrier Reef? Sharks sound relatively benign.
Whenever an ecologist or billionaire or politician has another brilliant idea, a plan to save humanity or improve the place, run. The earth was fine for a very long time without them. Whole ecosystems flourished and competed without their wisdom.
And then you get Boris ‘Winston’ Churchill assuring us that Putin will not use nuclear weapons so send more weapons into the conflict like British fighters and hundreds of German tanks. There is no way the Russians might overreact. They would not remember the Crimean war, WWI, WWII or the Cold War or Korea or Vietnam or Afghanistan or Syria.
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And that’s quite deliberate, of course. It’s all part of the dumbing down of the education system by the Left.
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George Carlin on “Saving The Planet”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c&t=5s
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Australia had the Diprotodont, which was sort of a giant wombat and as large as a hippo. Also there were giant kangaroos. They were meat for the marsupial lion which was as big and as heavy as an African lioness. They disappeared 30,000 years ago with the advent of aboriginal fire practices.
Dingos were bought to Australia 7000 years ago by the last wave of aboriginal people. Genetically they are identical to the domestic dog of Sri Lanka.
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We need herds of cattle, because we NEED TO EAT MEAT! 🙂
Did I mention that cows are Carbon Neutral..
They cannot physically, chemically or biologically, put out more “carbon” than they take in.
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And can be described as “self propelled self feeding high tech fermentation vats”.
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The whole planet is carbon neutral unless you have nuclear reactions. More importantly the reason CO2 has gone up in the atmosphere is slight ocean surface warming. Nothing to do with trees or fossil fuels. In fact trees are clearly short on CO2 as it is clearly an more limiting factor than H2O. CO2 is up 14% since 1988 and trees are up 14%, the size of Australia or Brazil in trees.
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What I would love to know from the 100 Top Green activists in the huge colour glossy Australian magazine this morning, an ode to activists, far bigger than the newspaper itself, is what they think the problem is? Why is CO2 let alone fossil fuel CO2 the enemy? CO2 is the gas of life from which all life is made. More is better. Ask the farmers.
And where is there actually a climate problem after 35 years? Where is the warming? What happened to our drought without end? Where is there any problem at all? And why are they attacking farmers? And miners? And transport? And manufacturers? Who else is left?
Why are they doing it? Surely with all their money there are better things to do, or is it all another business opportunity? I find it hard to believe they are all so ill informed. Dr. Andrew Forest claims a PhD in Marine Biology these days. Surely he’s heard of gaseous equilibrium with the water? Or was it by correspondence, photos of fish?
My feeling is that if the public knew that fossil fuel CO2 was only 3%, they would be asking questions and the whole thing would collapse as ridiculous. So why are none of our universities, organizations, the Chief Australian Scientist or any one else telling them the truth? The same with aborigines. Windmills. Solar panels. Is that it for renewables? What happened to nuclear?
Imagine if one out of those hundred notables said fossil fuel CO2 was negligible?
And why are we not allowed to build a dam to even our our cycle of drought and flooding rain. Who is in charge? Albanese? He is more focused on changing the constitution. Why is another puzzle.
Are these the top 100 people hell bent on wrecking the joint? Then someone thought it was a great idea to shoot 14,000 elephants in Zimbabwe, so intelligence like this is not uncommon.
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Did you not notice that all those “environmentalists” had schemes designed to take money out of your wallet and put it into theirs if not directly then by having the government act as a bagman. They are all ignorant shysters and if they are not ignorant they are hoping you are.
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And that would not have happened, especially on the edges of deserts, if the problem was a shortage of H2O. Clearly the world will take as much CO2 as it can get. By ‘the world’ I mean the living part, our part. Mountains and oceans may be majestic, but they are rocks and water. A plant or an animal or an insect is our living world. And the new Greens appear to hate them all.
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There’s the genuine (committed) problem solver
and then there’s the marketeer; thing is to distinguish
betwixt the two.
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Nah, easy.
Just look to anyone or anything not associated with government or academia, and lately … accredited medicine.
Not really joking, have they not all recently proven beyond doubt that their paramount concern is institutional preeminence, not intellectual inquiry and problem solving?
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That information will bug the climate hoaxers.
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Joel Salatin is a guru to the permaculture hippy crowd. He is famous for the idea of getting pigs to dig up the field prior to planting, to save on fertilizer and rejuvenate the soil. And also the idea of running cattle intensively to fertilise the soil.
Thing is, this is not new at all. Dairy farmers have been doing this for a long time. It’s called strip grazing the paddock. Nothing revolutionary.
Problem is, you’re still extracting more nutrients than you’re putting in. Dairy farming is extremely intensive agriculture and puts a lot of poo and wee on paddocks as they’re grazed. Way way more than anything in a desert.
if this Salatin guy’s theory worked as he says it does, we would see the benefits. Our soils should be problem free. Problem with all bad ideas is they are based on a truth. You do see benefits of cow poo of course, but it’s far from the stellar revolution they say it is.
Salatin basically has a business model that he sells product directly to the consumer which reaps greater profit. Then he worked out he can earn more money flying around the world preaching his half-baked theory to eager permaculture people.
I once went to a field day of a hippy style vegetable grower and here were the pigs in a pen in the baron paddock. It was clearly not going to work, but it gives you a chuckle.
If you want to see a guy who examines the topic of soils quite well, Gary Zimmerman is a pretty knowledgeable dairy farmer from the US who has written books on biological soil farming. Much better bet than hippy Salatin.
As far as Savoury goes, Id have him in a salt mine in Siberia for his elephant culling. But I’ll save that rant for another time. Classic example of a know it all ecologist trying to play God and making huge errors due to his dumb theory. His new one is better though.
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Good stuff. But what is a baron paddock? Do you mean barren? I suppose you do, but knowing nothing about farming despite helping out on farms, anything is possible and it sounded a bit posh and significant. You learn very little by watching and working. It’s a skill level passed down in farming families.
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The basic facts.
A cow excretes 60% of what she eats as organic fertiliser, in fact the finest grassland fertiliser available, and unable to be duplicated by a non-biological substitute .
That’s according to the research , published in 1945 By Bruce Levy , the director of the Grasslands Division of the NZ Dept. of Scientific and Industrial Research .
“you’re still extracting more nutrients than you’re putting in.”
What nutrients?
Carbon is not a nutrient? That’s what the soil organisms are living on.
More carbon is going in to the soil than is being extracted.
I think you meant to say that deficiencies resulting from removal of some mineral elements must be replenished. Well duh! You can’t get something for nothing.
You can get carbon , hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen from the air for free, but deficiencies of some elements must be amended first, if you want optimal nitrogen fixation.
NZ is naturally deficient in phosphorus , so in the first place that must be amended. I’ve applied a sprinkle three times in the last 40 years.
Sulphur deficiency similarly.
Nitrogen is free for the taking by growing clover.
“Our soils should be problem free.”
Well mine is ; what are you talking about?
The fertile soils of NZ have been generated over the last 150 years by rotational grazing with suitable sub-division, and the organic fertiliser that the grazing animals deposited, after the deficiencies of P and S were corrected.
Limestone is required occasionally to maintain optimum pH , because humus creation is acidifying, and calcium base saturation % needs to be maintained.
Regenerative agriculture is only appropriate where degeneration has already occurred.
The normal soil-generative practice of rotational grazing of grasslands results in an increasing depth of topsoil which also has an increase on cation/anion exchange capacity ie is more fertile.
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I would just like to say thank you to Jo and all the contributors to this article today.
In the 1990’s after we gave up publishing “The Inside News” Marilyn and I spent three years overseeing a cattle property for a couple in the process of retiring. The guy was the last of the true “pioneer farmers” – his grandfather had been the saddler in Nambour and on weekends had felled trees in the district for the timber mill.
His son had “selected” the land and established a dairy farm then lost most of it in The Great Depression. His son – the guy I knew – had spent his life reacquiring the property and converting it to beef cattle. The property was immaculately managed, consistently achieving highest prices at the livestock auctions.
I learned, and continued to implement the land and livestock practices that the retiring farmer had learned from his father, but never got the chance to ask the “why” of it all. Now thanks to Jo’s article and the efforts of contributors, I’m beginning to understand the logic of it and why it worked so well.
Once again, thank you.
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On our small acreage we both graze cattle and periodically slash and/or mulch the paddocks. The 43 hectares are divided into 20 paddocks and wattle is supplied by buried poly pipeline to troughs in 4 central locations.
When we first bought the property almost 8 years ago, it was dominated by tall, coarse African Lovegrass and had multiple patches of exposed alkaline soil. Today, all paddocks are amply covered and many species of various grasses – including native grasses – have appeared and prospered.
As many have commented, the cattle eat the grass, process it, and subsequently return nutrients via their urea and manure. As we rotate their access to paddocks, they do not damage the pasture by prolonged grazing, and allow recovery. As the years progressed, and particularly in rainy seasons as we have just experienced, we also use a slasher – and preferably the mulcher – to reduce the length of the grass, this allowing much to break down naturally and return more nutrients to the soil.
We have seen the benefits of grazing and careful management. If this is “regenerative farming” – then that is what we do. To us – it is the obvious process to follow. Mind you, we can use machinery in the process because our land is mot steep and is small enough to mangage.
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That should read “…and WATER is supplied by buried poly pipeline”
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“If this is “regenerative farming” – then that is what we do. ”
It’s only RE-generative , if you do something DE-generative first. Otherwise it’s just generative .
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It is also true that the “fire stick” customary burning of scrubland to both flush out kangaroos and other animals was instrumental on developing the open plains and grasslands in valleys that the early settlers sought out for grazing.Many critics of land clearing simply don’t understand the indigenous practices or the necessity of open space for use of the boomerang.
Once the aboriginal tribes left, and then large land holdings were divided and bought by environmentalists in recent years, we now see the growth of unconfined scrubland which burns ferociously in hot summers.
But the Green movement will not be told.
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Meanwhile today’s foot breaking dropout, The Australian glossy 100 page heavy magazine “The List” is a massive brochure on Green. Unbelievable. Climate Change is forgotten. Global Warming is forgotten. All there is is NETT ZERO. Nothing else matters to these peole. The end of fossil fuels is absolutely certain. No debate. No explanations. These are not people who will suffer from massive rises on electricity cost.
A big 4 page fold out by Audi on their new electric cars opens the magazine. And most of the most famous Green people chasing recognition also take out 2 and 3 pages advertisements, say the Commonwealth Bank. Even Richard Pratt is now a Green, not a massive manufacturer of cardboard boxes but a caring Green. Not a dirty industrialist at all. He has laundered himself at enormous expense.
No nuclear. No dams to store water, it’s all about ‘saving’ the environment by stopping everything. And a massive likely self funded advertisement for all the people, now famous around Australia as Greener than a paddock of lettuce. They will all have hand out reprints and framed copies on the foyer wall.
But where is the Top 100 free Australian Sceptics magazine? Perhaps Anthony Pratt can spare some cardboard? Full of people who cannot find any truth in Climate Change or Global Warming or the demise of the Great Barrier Reef or the value of wiping out all the animals and termites. Usually retired or independent, they cannot afford three page glossy spreads pushing the latest unaffordable limited use toy electric cars or Tiffany jewellery.
And who wants to read about people who lost everything fighting fighting for truth and justice, like Prof Peter Ridd? And a million dollars of public donations failed to help him win against a university with infinite money, our money. Who would supply the clothes for posing? A rags to rags story for the ages. He will not get a bronze statue. Would even Jo get a photo and writeup as a skeptic? Meanwhile former Chief Scientist Ian Chubb is in the big glossy magazine with his tale of woe, lamenting that change has to be handled well or it could be messy. Sage advice. Thank goodness for scientists.
It’s quite remarkable, you cannot tell the difference between such caring rich Green people and the who’s who of conspicuous consumption with their company cars, private jets. They look like the rich in their finest and attention seeking publicity hungry self promoters. In fact they make Megan and Harry look poor and humble and shy. Besides there’s a lovely two page spread on the new electric Range Rover. If you can afford it after you have paid for other people’s windmills.
And they care about farming too. Just not farmers or livestock or actual farming. Gina Rinehart would not be welcome in this set.
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Maybe he should have spoken to a farmer and gardener before he shot 14000 elephants.
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It was too urgent. They had to act. No time to think about it. Nett Zero elephants.
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And it was murder on a majestic scale, a scientific experiment. So many families! They learned something though. They were completely wrong. And he does have regrets. Who hasn’t.
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“And he does have regrets. Who hasn’t.”
Pfizer et al ! and they never will.
The regret will just slide off them.
Same with those pushing the AGW scam… Never any regrets for the damage done.
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It was 40,000 elephants, not 14,000
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Really? I mean.. wow?
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https://www.npr.org/transcripts/243721657
Interview with Alan savoury.
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Yes,
enlightened government can stop the topographic evolution of the planet.
Finally, after billions of years.
The glaciers, the deserts and the oceans will comply with their current consensus borders until the EU redraws them.
Unlike Putin.
Genders.
Genders must encouraged to evolve more quickly.
We don’t have enough yet.
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He may well be right that having large grazing herds is good for the environment. But I don’t think listening to someone who advocated slaughtering 14,000 elephants and then put his hands up in a ‘mea culpa’ moment is a wise move. If anything the last few decades has taught up that what we need to do is STOP listening to ‘experts’
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Why not?
It worked here for Judith Curry.
Apparently.
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Ever seen the documentary Return To Eden? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s4vWrHw3WY from Marijn Poels. He explains exactly this and interviews also Alan Savory in Zimbabwe (from 1:25:00).
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There is always an optimum level. A little bit can be good, but a lot can be disaster. This is the case for some chemicals which may be medicinal at lower levels but poisonous at higher levels, radiation, UV doses, exercising, fossil fuel use, etc. So it is with grazing, IMHO, so long as the land is not overgrazed, which can be achieved by moving the grazers or fencing it off after a period, etc. The problem arises because we think that all effects are unidirectional, and we forget about optimization. They call such a phenomenon, “Hormesis”.
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BTW, the theory behind this is also called “The Environmental Transition”. It is explicated in a number of places, including here.
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Jo, please read the interview with Alan savoury https://www.npr.org/transcripts/243721657
Congratulations on the well deserved award.
40,000 elephants!
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Killed 14,000 elephants……..a blunder.
Nice little throwaway line.
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